Late thoughts about a failed movie

Good heavens, no posts or comments on Retinal Damage in two weeks!

I suppose the following has some spoilers, so be forewarned.

As has been speculated would happen since Grindhouse's underwhelming box office performance here in the States, The Weinstein Company has split the film in two and added footage to Tarantino's segment for overseas markets. Kurt Russell has gone on record saying he disapproves, but everyone else seems to think Death Proof is better for the split and addition. However, some reports indicated that audiences didn't realize that they would get to see two films for one admission price and left after the Rodriguez movie.

Are people really that stupid? The film had been heavily marketed as a double feature by Rodriguez and Tarantino, and the lights never went up after Planet Terror ended -- it was immediately followed by more faux trailers. I think that a more likely reason for the film's failure was that it had no audience. Grindhouses were marginal theatres playing marginal movies; they weren't movies that mass audiences wanted to see (at least in public). Tarantino and Rodriguez have made their careers on recasting exploitation films in big(ger) budget contexts, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a mass audience wants to see these kind of genre films in a quasi-grindhouse format.

Furthermore, only Rodriguez really went after the feel of a cheap exploitation film (though his use of expensive prosthetics and digital effects limited the ultimate effect). The narrative leaps of logic, the fascination with carnality and horror -- these Planet Terror has in spades. Death Proof on the other hand is nothing other than a typical Tarantino film, in which characters spout "perfect" dialog referencing obscure movies, television shows and musical acts while committing or otherwise experiencing acts of violence. Aside from its deliberately anticlimactic ending -- or rather, its structure that ends at the climax with no denouement -- Death Proof is generic in the wrong sense: It references the tropes of a particular "kind" of film (here, the Tarantino movie, itself already almost fatally self-referential and fatally referenced by hundreds of other "independent" directors like Guy Ritchie) without embracing or building on them. Tarantino's films have always struck me as nothing more than a tissue of other film references held together by his admittedly funny dialog. Beyond the fact that a group of women exact diegetically deserved revenge on Stuntman Mike (a fact somewhat hamstrung by the enjoyment Tarantino wrings in building up to and then graphically showing Mike's murder of the first quartet of women), Death Proof isn't about much more than being a Tarantino film. One doesn't need to have a hard-on for Vanishing Point to follow the narrative. As such, it's a rather flat film, even if it is probably the better made and in some ways more exciting of the two -- Mike's failed attempt to kill Zoe is gripping action. But once Tarantino has had his fun, the movie ends with no payoff. I've always felt that his films were rather masturbatory, and this is perhaps the best example yet of that feeling.

I'd pay top dollar to see Machete, though.

Some have speculated that Grindhouse's length -- 190 minutes -- deterred viewers, that they didn't want to sit through three hours of action and exploitation. Perhaps -- although viewers have not let length keep them from turning out in droves for the Pirates of the Carribbean or Spider-Man sequels, or any of the Lord of the Rings films. In fact, three of the top-ten grossing films of all time are about three hours long. Adjusted for inflation, Gone with the Wind is the top-grossing film in history, and it's four hours long.

Last thought, largely unexplored: I am kind of depressed that one of the more interesting things to talk about in cinema these days is the failure of Grindhouse. A marketing ploy masquerading as a coherent film is a fitting but sad testament to the current state of American film as an industry and art form.